Rochefort and around

Colbert, Louis XIV’s navy minister, built Rochefort in the seventeenth century to repel the English and watch over Protestant-leaning La Rochelle. It remained an important naval base for centuries, with its shipyards, sail-makers, munition factories and a hospital. Built on a strict grid plan, the town is a monument to the tidiness of the military mind. Place Colbert is just as the seventeenth century left it, complete with lime trees, and cobblestones brought from Canada as ships’ ballast. The banks of the Charente river are beautiful, dominated by the eighteenth-century Royal Ropeworks and the stark, majestic Transporter Bridge, built in 1900.

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Musée d’Art et d’Histoire and Maison Pierre Loti

The explorers Pierre Loti – alias novelist Julien Viaud (1850–1923) – and the Lesson brothers haunt Rochefort’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire at 63 rue de Gaulle, which houses exotic objects brought back from expeditions, and nautical artworks. The Maison Pierre Loti at 141 rue Pierre-Loti is closed for renovations at the time of writing, but once it’s open a visit is essential. It’s part of a row of modestly proportioned grey-stone houses, outwardly a model of petit bourgeois conformity and respectability, inside an outrageous and fantastical series of rooms decorated to exotic themes, from medieval gothic to an Arabian room complete with minaret. You can see how the house suited Loti’s private life: he threw extravagant fancy dress parties and, rather more scandalously, fathered more children with his Basque mistress, kept in a separate part of the house, than with his French wife.

Île d’Aix

Lying in the Bay of Biscay like a forgotten croissant, Île d’Aix (pronounced “eel dex”), just 2km long, has a population of only 200. It’s a romantic place – frequented by abdicating emperors, wild birds and hollyhocks. It’s also well-defended, with forts and ramparts. Over the course of history the island, particularly Fort Liédot, has often served as a prison, notably during the Crimean and First World wars. The best time to visit is in spring or autumn, avoiding the midsummer crowds; hire a bicycle, cycle round the perimeter of the island in an hour or two, paddle in the sea, and enjoy a splendid lunch at Hôtel Napoléon.

Napoleon lived on Île d’Aix for three days in July 1815, planning his escape to America, only to find himself on the way to St Helena and exile. Now his former home, the Musée Napoléon (wmusees-nationaux-napoleoniens.org), exhibits his clothing, art and arms. Napoleon’s white dromedary camel, from whose back he conducted his Egyptian campaign, is lodged nearby at the Musée Africain.

Brouage and Marennes

Eighteen kilometres southwest of Rochefort is Brouage, a seventeenth-century military base. The way into the town is through the Porte Royale in the north wall of the original fortifications. Locked inside, Brouage seems abandoned and somnolent; even the sea has retreated, and all that’s left of the harbour is a series of pools (claires), where oysters are reared.

Half a dozen kilometres south of Brouages is the oyster village of Marennes. It is the centre of production in a region that supplies over sixty percent of France’s requirements. The village’s speciality is fattening creuses oysters, a species bred in France since the 1970s. It’s a lucrative but precarious business, vulnerable to storm damage, temperature changes, salinity in the water, the ravages of starfish and umpteen other natural disasters.

Oysters begin life as minuscule larvae, which are “born” about three times a year. When a birth happens, the oystermen are alerted by a special radio service, and they all rush out to place their “collectors” – usually arrangements of roofing tiles – for the larvae to cling to. They mature there for eight or nine months, and are then scraped off and moved to parcs in the tidal waters of the sea. Finally, they’re taken to claires – shallow rectangular pools where they are kept permanently covered by water that’s less salty than sea water. Here they fatten up and acquire the greenish colour the market expects. With “improved” modern oysters, the whole cycle, which used to take five years, now takes about two.